In January, Birds On The Edge reported on an exciting project to remove rats from St Agnes and Gugh in the Isles of Scilly in order to safeguard important numbers of nesting seabirds (see the article here). Since then the project has progressed nicely:

The Isles of Scilly Seabird Recovery Project has three primary and inter-linked aims:

•To reverse recent declines in seabird populations on the Isles of Scilly through removal of a non-native species (brown rat) from the islands of St Agnes and Gugh;
•To enable people living in and visiting the Isles of Scilly to learn about, take pride in, and play an active role in celebrating and conserving their seabird and wider natural heritage;
•To train and support island communities to embrace the benefits of seabird recovery, including the removal of rats, and continue to protect their heritage once the project has ended.

The islands, which are located off Cornwall, are home to breeding populations of 14 seabird species and approximately 20,000 birds. Eradication experts from the UK and New Zealand’s Wildlife Management International Limited (WMIL) will manage the poisoning of several thousand rats.

“Among many challenges our seabirds face, the greatest threat on land is predation of eggs and chicks by brown rats,” said Jaclyn Pearson, Project Manager of the Isles of Scilly Seabird Recovery Project.

Elizabeth Bell, from WMIL said (see BBC Cornwall): “A period of intensive baiting will start from 8^th November and most of the rats will be dead by the end of November. We’ll then target the surviving rats.”

A long-term monitoring programme will start at the beginning of 2014 to check the rodents have been eradicated from the islands. Ms Bell said all the bait stations were enclosed, tied down and were designed not to kill any other species, such as rabbits.

Ms Pearson said: “The project is 25 years in length, although the project team will disband after five years, for the remaining 20 years the community will continue to protect their seabird heritage, by keeping the islands ‘rat-free’. This includes correct waste management, ensuring bio-security on boats and freight to the islands, and of course, educating all visitors to the islands to be vigilant and ‘rat on a rat'”.

“This is the largest community-based island restoration project attempted in the world to date, with 85 residents living here year round.”

The project has recruited a team of ‘seabird task force volunteers’ and the first arrived on the islands in early November of the start of the delivery phase. They will be on St Agnes and Gugh baiting and monitoring rats for the next six months. After their induction to the project and the team, they were straight out to collect windfall apples (removing this food source away from the rats) and on to meet the community as part of an evening community talk ahead of the baiting starting. Safety protocols around the bait stations were reiterated and the WMIL team will be on call 24 hours a day.

On 12^th November the local news ‘ ITV West-Country’ came to report on the  first day of baiting. They flew to the islands on the first flight of the day to capture the excitement on this important day in the project (see the video here).

Jaclyn Pearson spent this first important week of baiting with the WMIL team and the volunteers, and has been interviewing the volunteers for the local radio station to find out why they have volunteered for the project and what it means to them.  Volunteer Lyndsey Death says “I am so happy to be spending the winter on the islands gaining skills and learning about island restoration projects. The project is so well organised, I am really enjoying it.”.

Many thanks to Jaclyn Pearson for help in compiling this report. See the project’s poster here, read regular updates and sign up for the newsletter.

From ScienceDaily

The ‘early bird’ strategy has been revealed by a team studying the winter foraging behaviour of birds in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. The researchers fitted over 2,000 birds with tiny PIT radio tags. They then used 101 feeders which detected these tags and captured the exact time individual birds found each feeder. By moving 36 of these feeders around the forest throughout the day, and recording the results, the team showed that birds gathered information about new food sources during the morning so that they can then eat it later in the day.

The birds studied were a mixture of great tits, blue tits, marsh tits, coal tits and nuthatches. The full report, published this week, can be downloaded here

Damien Farine of Oxford University, who led the research, says that ‘birds have to store body-fat to avoid starving during the cold winter nights, but this can make them slower and less manoeuvrable so that they are more likely to be caught by predators’. ‘So there is a trade-off, where birds need to remain lean enough in order to ‘outrun’ their predators, or at least the next slowest bird, during the day but also store enough fat to survive each night.’

The team knew from previous studies at Wytham Woods that, when the predation risk appears high, birds delay putting on fat until late in the day. The researchers wanted to test the idea that, instead of simply ‘idly waiting’ until the afternoon, birds were actively seeking out new sources of food to work out where their next meal was coming from.

‘We used new tracking technologies to investigate how great tits, blue tits, and other common garden birds, balance the competing risks of predation and starvation’. ‘Our results show that these birds display very different patterns of food discovery in the morning and afternoon; very few new food sources were found during the afternoon, whereas nearly every new food source that we put out during the morning was quickly discovered. It supports the idea of an ‘early bird’ strategy of scouting for food early on so that they can return to feast a couple of hours before dusk in preparation for a long winter’s night.’

Winter is a tough time for small garden birds as not only is there less natural food available but their predators, such as the sparrowhawk, are keen to stock up their own fat reserves and so are hunting every day. The short days and long cold nights mean that small birds can lose around 10% of their body weight over a single night so that individuals failing to pile on the grams on even one day can starve and won’t be around to pass on their genes the next summer.

‘Because small birds can’t reproduce without surviving the winter they have evolved a complex set of behaviours that enables them to maximise their chance of both surviving predators and avoiding starvation,’ said Damien Farine ‘It’s a good example of how animals alter their behaviour to respond to constantly changing environmental conditions. It also shows how new technologies, like tiny PIT tags, are enabling us to explore questions about animal survival strategies at an unprecedented scale.’

From The Independent

Anglo-Scottish rivalry takes a completely new turn. In a surprising story of contrasting wildlife fortunes, southern England is rapidly losing some of its most attractive summer birds, from swallows to willow warblers, while at the same time, Scotland is gaining them.

It’s not that birds are quitting the South of Britain to go and nest in the North. Rather, the southern populations of several species of summer visitors are rapidly declining, while their northern populations are expanding substantially. The striking and so far unexplained divergence has been revealed by the magnificent new atlas of British and Irish (and Channel Islands) birds, all 700 pages of it, which has been six years in the making and is published next week. See a taster of the new atlas here

It displays a growing North-South contrast in abundance, over the past two decades, in at least eight species – swallow, house martin and sand martin, willow warbler, garden warbler and grasshopper warbler, plus tree pipit and cuckoo. (Other species are showing signs of this, but it is in these eight that the shift is clear).

Scotland, long seen in bird terms as the grandiose home of the golden eagle, is now a much better place than the Home Counties to hear two of spring’s most delicate sounds – the musical double note of the cuckoo and the silvery cascade of the willow warbler – and to witness the exhilarating springtime sight of swallow acrobatics.

The population of the willow warbler, for example, has declined by 28 per cent in England since the early 1990s but in Scotland it increased by 33 per cent over the same period. Willow warbler was lost too as a Jersey breeding species. Over the same period, the cuckoo declined in England by no less than 63 per cent and it is missing now across much of the South (it too no longer breeds in Jersey). But over Scotland as a whole, while there was a total decline of 5 per cent, in some areas such as the Highlands and Islands there was a notable growth in numbers.

Swallows too are increasingly thin on the ground in the South-East of England but increasing north of the border, and the same can be seen for house martin and sand martin.

These shifts are vividly displayed, with green for losses and red for gains, in the maps of Bird Atlas 2007-2011 (see willow warbler here) – the most complete overview of bird distribution and change in Britain, Ireland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man ever put together. Produced by the British Trust for Ornithology with BirdWatch Ireland and the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, the atlas examines the breeding and wintering fortunes of nearly 300 species over the 2007 to 2011 period, as noted down by 40,000 volunteer observers who between them contributed 19 million records. More than 99 per cent of the land surface of the British Isles has been covered.

The resultant snapshot of the present is engrossing, but the real value is in the contrasts the atlas affords with the two previous bird atlases of the British Isles, done for the periods 1968-1972 and 1988-91. What results, says the BTO’s director, Andy Clements, is “a 40-year story of change”.

There are changes in all directions. An arresting one is the spread eastwards of a pair of species once persecuted by gamekeepers – the buzzard and the raven. Two decades ago they were largely confined to the west of a line drawn from the Pennines to Southampton; now (perhaps because persecution has ended) both birds have spread all over England. During this period the buzzard has also colonised Jersey.

There are many such: the hobby, the dashing summer falcon, is moving steadily northwards in distribution, while the nightingale is shrinking back remorselessly towards South-East England and its stronghold in Essex, Kent and Sussex. In terms of sheer increase, the prize is taken by the little egret, which at the time of the last atlas did not breed in Britain; now there are about 700 breeding pairs (with around four small colonies in Jersey). But it is the English-Scottish shift of the willow warbler et al. which is most remarkable. All eight birds concerned winter in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is very probable that this offers a clue to what is happening, although it has not been teased out yet. Climate change, affecting the hatching of their caterpillar food, may also be playing a role.

Yet whatever the cause, there it is in the maps. “We have removed observer bias and we are sure this is a real phenomenon, and a notable one,” said co-author Dr Simon Gillings. Have a look for yourself from next week. It is the most riveting bird book produced in Britain for years.

From Alderney Wildlife Trust

Following action by The Wildlife Trusts, RSPB and RSPCA the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) decided to reclassify Polyisobutelene (PIB), under the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), making it illegal to discharge any amount into the sea.

The IMO is stopping ships from discharging PIB at sea after birds covered in the sticky substance were washed up on the Channel coastline. Over 4,000 seabirds washed ashore, dead or dying between February and May, after there were two separate spills. The substance which has been likened to PVA glue in consistency, coats the birds feathers, rendering them unable to fly or maintain core body temperature.

The tragedy, the largest marine pollution incident of its kind in the region since Torrey Canyon, shocked thousands of people. At a meeting of the IMO’s working group on the Evaluation of Safety and Pollution Hazards of Chemicals (ESPH), it was decided to change the classification of high viscosity PIBs and prohibit any discharge at sea from 2014. This will also apply to new “highly-reactive” forms of PIB, which are currently being transported un-assessed.

The recommendation to do this had been made by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) on behalf of the UK Government, following vigorous campaigning by wildlife charities and the public.

This was a decision which was expected to take years and the efforts of all those who lobbied so hard in the Channel Islands should not be forgotten.

Thanks go out to GSPCA, JSPCA, Durrell,  La Société Guernesiaise,  La Société Jersiaise and the National Trust for Jersey who joined the AWT campaign and all of their Facebook and Twitter followers! The Birds On The Edge report can be read here.

Today’s decision is a real step forward, safeguarding our seas and sealife for future generations.